By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court should overturn Mississippi’s Jim Crow-era practice of removing voting rights from people convicted of certain felonies, including nonviolent crimes such as forgery and timber theft, attorneys say in new court papers.

Most of the people affected are disenfranchised for life because the state provides few options for restoring ballot access.

“Mississippi’s harsh and unforgiving felony disenfranchisement scheme is a national outlier,” attorneys representing some who lost voting rights said in an appeal filed Wednesday. They wrote that states “have consistently moved away from lifetime felony disenfranchisement over the past few decades.”

This case is the second in recent years — and the third since the late 19th century — that asks the Supreme Court to overturn Mississippi’s disenfranchisement for some felonies. The cases use different legal arguments, and the court rejected the most recent attempt in 2023.

The new appeal asks justices to reverse a July ruling from the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which said Mississippi legislators, not the courts, must decide whether to change the laws.

Stripping away voting rights for some crimes is unconstitutional because it is cruel and unusual punishment, the appeal argues. A majority of justices rejected arguments over cruel and unusual punishment in June when they cleared the way for cities to enforce bans on homeless people sleeping outside in public places.

Attorneys who sued Mississippi over voting rights say the authors of the state’s 1890 constitution based disenfranchisement on a list of crimes they thought Black people were more likely to commit. A majority of the appeals judges wrote that the Supreme Court in 1974 reaffirmed constitutional law allowing states to disenfranchise felons.

About 38% of Mississippi residents are Black. Nearly 50,000 people were disenfranchised under the state’s felony voting ban between 1994 and 2017. More than 29,000 of them have completed their sentences, and about 58% of that group are Black, according to an expert who analyzed data for plaintiffs challenging the voting ban.

To regain voting rights in Mississippi, a person convicted of a disenfranchising crime must receive a governor’s pardon or win permission from two-thirds of the state House and Senate. In recent years, legislators have restored voting rights for only a few people.

The other recent case that went to the Supreme Court argued that authors of Mississippi’s constitution showed racist intent when they chose which felonies would cause people to lose the right to vote.

In that ruling, justices declined to reconsider a 2022 appeals court decision that said Mississippi remedied the discriminatory intent of the original provisions in the state constitution by later altering the list of disenfranchising crimes.

In 1950, Mississippi dropped burglary from the list. Murder and rape were added in 1968. The Mississippi attorney general issued an opinion in 2009 that expanded the list to 22 crimes, including timber larceny, carjacking, felony-level shoplifting and felony-level writing bad checks.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a 2023 dissent that Mississippi’s list of disenfranchising crimes was “adopted for an illicit discriminatory purpose.”

Originally Published: November 22, 2024 at 12:11 PM CST

JACKSON, Miss. (WLBT) – Four of Mississippi’s Supreme Court Justices were up for re-election this year. Two of those had opponents. One lost in the general election and the other is going to a runoff.

The outcome of next Tuesday’s runoff could change the overall balance of power on the court.

Michigan State University College of Law Professor Quinn Yeargain explains that nonpartisan elections make it tough to get a sense of the ideology of state supreme courts.

The best way to get a glimpse of how the court leans is to look at previous decisions. Yeargain pulled six notable cases to examine.

“In recent years the Mississippi Supreme Court has been more of a far-right court or very conservative court than a moderate-conservative court,” noted Yeargain who is a state constitutional law scholar.

He created a color-coded chart with pink indicating more conservative decisions and green the more moderate ones.

“And so a lot of the decisions that it has reached have been or have had a tendency to be a little bit more extreme, more deferential to the state legislature, more deferential to the governor, less willing to recognize individual rights and liberties, less willing to believe that the government has isolated peoples, individual rights and liberties,” said Yeargain.

The more conservative opinion won out in all of the example cases. But one of those four justices that leaned that way every time referenced is now being replaced. Justice Dawn Beam was defeated by Gulfport lawyer David Sullivan.

“There’s still a lot that will need to be learned about the ideology of the new justice,” Yeargain noted.

Then there’s this runoff for Central District 1 Position 3 with Jim Kitchens and Jenifer Branning.

“Justice Kitchens has been more willing to hold the government to account, to express skepticism about the nature of what the government is doing, and how it is acting,” he said. “But Senator Branning, for example, has been in the government. She has been one of these actors and I think it’s fair to conclude that she might be more deferential to the legislature or to the Governor in how she approached her rulings.”

Yeargain notes that it’s not to say that would be the case for Branning.

He hopes voters will do research about the positions of the judges before returning to the polls for the runoff.

WATCH: Justice Jim Kitchen’s Interview on WLBT+

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